A former Chicago police officer was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison today for using his police muscle to extort protection payoffs from heroin and crack dealers in the Ida B. Wells public housing complex.

Kallatt Mohammed, 47, remained defiant at his sentencing hearing, telling U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman he was following the orders of his superior officer in order to be granted time off to visit his children in Ohio, not because he was interested in the cash.

"I never planned to do it. I never took anything that didn't belong to me," Mohammed said in a firm voice.

Standing before the bench in a striped dress shirt and tie, Mohammed had appeared to finish talking when his attorney prompted him to continue. Mohammed then briefly apologized "for any misbehavior that I participated in."

"But I had no intentions of depriving anybody of anything," he added.

The judge had stern words for Mohammed, calling it "outrageous" that an African-American police officer would violate the trust placed in him to protect a neighborhood already ravaged by drugs and crime.

"You're the law here. ... You betrayed your badge and you betrayed our community," Coleman said.

Under federal sentencing guidelines, Mohammed could have been sentenced to up to 2 ½ years in prison. He was ordered to surrender to prison in late January.

A veteran Wentworth District tactical officer, Mohammed pleaded guilty in August to one count of theft of government funds.

Mohammed and his supervisor, Sgt. Ronald Watts, were arrested in February after a sting in which both stole almost $5,000 in cash from an informant who was posing as a drug courier but secretly working undercover for the FBI, according to the charges.

In pleading guilty, Mohammed said he and Watts had been extorting drug dealers long before the sting operation in November. The two demanded protection payoffs from dealers at Ida B. Wells on the South Side in at least 2007 and 2008, authorities said.

The officers did not know that some of the dealers who were extorted were also secretly cooperating with law enforcement and handed over $4,700 in government funds in payoffs to them, according to Mohammed's plea agreement.

Mohammed, a 14-year veteran with the department, and Watts, who had been on the job for 18 years, were stripped of their police powers and suspended without pay after their arrest.

Watts, 49, who was charged with Mohammed, has pleaded not guilty to the federal charges.

A burst of thunderstorm activity across the Chicago-area in mid-afternoon Sunday resulted in multiple injuries and a death at an event in west suburban Wood Dale, the collapse of a dome in northwest suburban Rosemont and the temporary evacuation of the music festival Lollapalooza in Grant Park...